Welling is a town of homeowners in early middle age: couples, families and long-stayers who bought semis and kept them. Nearly eight in ten own their home. The typical resident is about forty. Household incomes are comfortable on two salaries. It is one of the most steadily ordinary places in south-east London, and the residents seem pleased about that.
Welling is a home-owning town. At the 2021 census, which is the source for the population figures on this page, 78% of households owned their home, 13% rented privately and 8% rented from the council or a housing association. Most people here are paying off a mortgage or have finished paying it, and a "To Let" board is a rare sight on a Welling street.
The typical resident is 40, and 28% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Welling is middle-aged in the literal sense, with enough younger adults to keep the primary schools full and enough settled forty-somethings to keep the houses from changing hands too often.
The Office for National Statistics models the typical household income across Welling at about £77,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That figure is gross, averaged over the area and a few years old, and no national comparison sits beside it here, because gross household income is one of the easiest figures to misread. It is the income of two working adults and a mortgage, enough to live comfortably and not quite enough to stop checking the bank balance.
Households in Welling come in the expected shapes. Couples with dependent children make up 24% of households, lone-parent families 12% and people living alone 22%. Single pensioners living alone are 12% of all households, part of that 22%, which leaves the other people living alone as younger adults. It is a town of family houses that still have families in them, with a steady group of older residents who stayed after the children left.
On qualifications, 30% of residents hold a degree and 19% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students are 2% of residents, because Welling has no university, and young people who go away to study tend to move out to do it. Most people here sit between the two ends: a trade, an apprenticeship, college or a degree, as with most ordinary London suburbs.
At the 2021 census, 85% of Welling's residents described their health as good or very good. Bexley Council's area, as distinct from Welling itself, has a preventable death rate similar to England's and a smoking rate of about 7%, also similar to England. Those borough-level figures say nothing out of the ordinary in either direction, and nothing about any individual resident.
The people of Welling are a clear strength of the place: settled, home-owning and comfortably off, they make a town that is easy to understand and easy to fit into if you are looking for the same thing.